A rockier proposition, re-channelling the militant, straight-ahead postpunk spirit of 1980, especially on Psychic Attack.

On TFF, NIN and Cab-Volt industrialism nag at Rileyesque rave while referencing The Beatles’ Because. Clever.

Whether on a squelchy analogue wig-out or swaying in the breeze of apocalyptic desert rock, this is a Brit-psych absolute peach.

Goat have built a minor cult around their progressive, globe-straddling psychedelic world music, and this third album will only lengthen the Kool-Aid queue.

The engrossing full-album reprise Forever Now gives an insight into frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s booze and pills-induced 2012 meltdown, but otherwise Revolution Radio is more melodic air-punching about guns, gas and the American nightmare. File under: Ain’t Broke.

Thankfully, they haven’t abandoned their experimental urges completely, with Apricity striking a deft balance between rushing choruses and free electronic grooves.

The re-inclusion of guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch to the band has seen Korn embracing their dense roots and they’re all the better for it.

Hynde may not win over many new converts with this old-school collection, but the rich soil of classic Americana is a fine place for one of our greatest rock voices to find fresh inspiration.

The additional CDs redeem the era. Every B-side here is superior to half the record.

On this fifth album they do sound like a country band who like to rock sometimes, rather than southern rockers who do country, but their versatility makes such distinctions academic.

Ultimately, Airbourne play honest, no-nonsense, straight-down-the-line classic rock in a manner true to all the basic tenets of the genre.

Alas, by front-loading the album with the kind of numbers U2 would be proud of--witness Reverend--Walls grinds to a halt in tedious balladry, rather than scaling new heights.

Dillinger remain a proudly unique proposition, and Dissociation is a thrilling, and apparently final, fuck you to the status quo.

Clearly inspired by the recent critical upswing, but beholden to no one, this is the creation of a band with an utterly focused sense of identity. The result is gloriously uneasy listening for the masses.

This is a clever hybrid of prog, hard rock and dance; there’s even a full-blown power ballad (that’s part The Tubes, part Kate Bush atmospherics) in the shape of All We Have Is Now.

It’s a bold, bombastic rock album that really chimes with our troubled times. Alter Bridge got issues, and that’s a good thing.

Ghost hammers Merseybeat into grotesque new shapes and closer Easily Misbled, an elegant mariachi acoustic noir, is a refreshing respite. But too much here is sub-Dinosaur Pile-Up slush, dredged, ironically, from Britrock’s bottom end.

Really it should get 10 but nobody’s perfect.

This is a fine album which continues to plough the Gong furrow with seasoned aplomb.

When real, life-changing tragedy strikes a master of dark musical arts, masterpieces can be made: Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella. Bowie’s Blackstar. Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell. The Bad Seeds’ sixteenth album, Skeleton Tree.

With Total Depravity, though, they’ve stepped up a level--with co-producer El-P ushering in psych synth squelches and creepy gospel (the epically titled Do Your Bones Glow At Night) and on the magnificent Low Lays The Devil a vintage blues squal equal to the Black Keys.

Produced by Deap Vally and Yeah Yeah Yeah’s guitarist Nick Zinner, Femjism drags the band forward into a brave new future while keeping their mean, sexy, muscle-bound rock’n’roll snarl fully intact. A real blazer.

Each track is a short story, a beautifully composed snapshot of a moment in a life, all set to choruses masterfully crafted to slot in alongside the radio-rock classics of the 1980s.

Springsteen has previously alluded to this [early] period of his career, albeit in the roundabout manner of fashioning songs (most notably on The River) inspired by the music he heard blaring out of jukeboxes in his youth. Similarly, formerly he has addressed feelings of emptiness and disillusionment on self-reflective songs such as Two Faces or 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), although sat in front of a computer screen he has less recourse to clumsy metaphor.

The Crystals, Ramones, Blondie, Television, The Strokes, The Walkmen and the Friends theme all feed into Never Enough, their suave, glitter-ball garage pop debut, full of synapse-shagging surf punk melodies like Summertime, In Our Blood and I Don’t Wanna Live In California.

VDGG’s fourth album since they became a trio in 2007, Do Not Disturb is every bit as strange, angular and unpredictable as anything the band did in the 70s.

While nothing on this album will replace anything from Doolittle or Surfer Rosa in your affections, bangers such as Classic Masher and Um Chagga Lagga detonate with a palpable sense of fun that leaves you in no doubt who the authors are and that it’s a better album than Trompe La Monde.

The pair celebrate the (literal) tracks that made America, but also lament the railroad’s decline with tenderness on Jean Ritchie’s The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore.

The USA in the year of Trump, though, has inspired Drive-By Truckers to make this lacerating denunciation of the state of their nation, which stands right up there with Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball and their own best work.

Live At The Hollywood Bowl is back, with new mixes by Giles Martin that sharpen the sound but don’t ditch the screams, plus extra tracks, including a wonderful I Want To Hold Your Hand. The great lost Beatles album just became the essential new Beatles album.

A mad, florid knockout. Strength through absurdity.

If Bowie gave Hunter the confidence to steer Mott through the hits that started with Honaloochie Boogie and opened up his solo career, the trials and tribulations of the subsequent 42 years have put him in a solid position to dish out sage advice and put cockier elements in their place, which he does on the opening That’s When The Trouble Starts and closing Long Time.

If you want progression, look elsewhere. Here is ‘just’ another routinely radiant TFC album.

Dense, rich and deeply rewarding.

A near-constant crisis of confidence isn’t always the best character trait for a rock’n’roll singer, but this Devon power(ish) trio make it work on their solid debut album.

Chunky but not over-egged at 14 tracks, Bury Me In My Boots is packed with honed tunes, new ideas and loveable old tricks.

Crucially, radioactive classics such as Blood Red River, Weird Love, Atom Bomb Baby, Swampland and their psychobilly spray-job on Jonathan Richman’s She Cracked still sound vital and audaciously genre-crushing. The Scientists well deserve this Mount Rushmore of a set.

California collects 14 hook-drenched punk-pop barnstormers that both reflect nostalgically on their youthful vigours (Bored To Death, Kings Of The Weekend, San Diego) and revisit them impressively (Teenage Satellites, No Future).

As with any compilation, it’s never entirely clear how much clearance from publishers impacts on the criteria for inclusion, but there are rare treats to be mined here.

It’s all smart stuff, but presented with tunes that hook into your brain. They’ve lost none of their spark in the 34 years since their debut, and have the edge on bands half their age.

If shiny, groovy, melodic, finger-snapping, guitar-led pop-rock is your tipple, you’ll want to guzzle down Washed Away in one.

All things considered, Lady In Gold is a more satisfying listen than its predecessor, with a host of truly great moments.

A fine album that’s more imaginative than reimagining.

Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel is full of things we’ve become accustomed to over the band’s previous three albums: psychedelic trippiness, carefree country-soul, swampy southern rock rolled out under a baking California sun. Yet it’s also wonderfully loose and instinctive.

By-the-book, yes, but still a page-turner.

We’re All Somebody From Somewhere sounds like an album conceived as a therapy project, one in which all the interesting corners of Tyler’s persona have been neatly rounded off. There’s no pizazz, very little spirit, not much sparkle and no sex.

Lyrically this has all been done better before, but it does show that Beck is fully engaged with the world. Moreover, Loud Hailer’s often stunning tapestry of vampy rock, funk, Southern blues and wah-wah wizardry proves that all of his considerable faculties are as sharp as they ever were.

Like their 60s albums, it’s a hodgepodge of self-penned songs and songs written by others, with a few vintage rave-ups thrown into the mix--‘mix’ being the operative word for this patchy affair.

This line-up’s chemistry has reached peak levels here, however, leading to astonishingly wild, lysergic adventures in dynamic sound like sprawling opener Cloud Of Forgetting and the bleak, amorphous 21 minutes of Frankie M.

Recent converts need not be overly alarmed, however, for while Ellipsis contains some of the most aggressive material Biffy have yet recorded (Wolves Of Winter, the gloriously infectious Animal Style and On A Bang) there are equal measures of fragile beauty.

Get Gone is a tumble dryer full of retro ideas given a contemporary currency by their restless drive, which evades categorisation.

The guitar tones and drum sounds are worthy of a review in themselves, micro-nuanced even within a track, and set in a 3D space that both breathes and is right up in your face at the same time.

Cutting their teeth in New York’s surviving venues, the quintet (first signings to Daptone’s new Wick offshoot) arrive like a most welcome anachronism.

A major work of stunning breadth and originality, heralding a talent who shines a blinding white light in the post-Prince darkness.

At first it’s disorientating, but gradually--it’s 90 minutes long--it becomes mesmeric, relaxing and not unlike a Laurie Anderson or Brian Eno ‘sound installation’.

More of the same, then, but for bleak Scandinavian beauty, Katatonia are still hard to beat.

Thanks to the band’s own accumulated expertise and the masterly stitching qualities of Danger Mouse, it’s a tightly woven affair, never messy or maudlin or self-indulgent; a dreamcoat of many colours, a marble rye of genres.

While it can’t match the last, extremely impressive Heartbreakers set, Hypnotic Eye, it’s a strong country-rock presentation from what’s not quite the sultan of side projects but rather more than Petty’s return-to-roots Tin Machine.

It works, thanks in this case to an engagingly loopy clutch of lysergic psych-pop oddities created with Primus frontman Les Claypool.

Sporadically great but decidedly patchy, A Moon Shaped Pool is not the sound of a great band dying, more a great band spreading themselves too thinly.

It’s well-meant but well-trodden, rarely exciting ground.

On third album Double Vanity it seems the wide-open spaces of their Oklahoma home have inspired something rather beautiful to zone out to.

There’s much that rocks here, and rocks deep on this four-string feast with multiple dishes.

The funk is solid in this one.

The results are mostly magical, largely because these songs still sound like Simon at his wry and melodic best.

A mixed bag of variable results, then, though Reid’s voice remains consistently magnificent throughout.

Strip away all the sumptuous studio texture and these lyrics--about savage love, violence and revolution--are sodden with adolescent gothpunk cliché. But this scarcely matters when the future arena anthems Magnetized and We Never Tell hit their stride: lusty, energised and refreshingly shallow.

Devotees of blues-rock and the trio’s past glories will relish taking a spin in their new model.

Cockily adventurous, By Default is a plasma grenade lobbed out of the blues rock trenches.

It sounds more like a collection of polished home recordings than a truly coherent band album, but when the harmonies fly and the melodies tumble--as they do on the genuinely lovely Titanic or on the soaring Squirrel vs Snake--The Posies can still reach those old highs.

With the heft of rock and fat bottom of funk, Heavy neatly summarises the sound achieved by guitarist Dan Taylor, bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul, while singer Kelvin Swaby adds the requisite guts and grit.

At its best, the results of this level of craftsmanship are thrilling.

The result is masterful: unsettling, retro-futuristic, beautiful and intense, but deeply immersive and listenable.

This album finds them surrounded by squelching basslines, scattershott guitars and pop-eyed vocals, and it's brilliant.

While frontwoman Ritzy Bryan remains a force of nature, there’s a lack of eureka moments this time, leaving us with a slow-burner rather than an inferno.

With their warm, evocative, hot fuzz production, muted vocals and keening atmospherics that set them down somewhere between Slowdive, Mew and early Radiohead (see the surely deliberate echo of Creep in Eaten By Worms for evidence of the latter), they sigh their way through a set of tracks that are simply billowing with maudlin beauty.

Bob Dylan regulars Larry Campbell and Tony Garnier pop up but this isn’t a star-studded exercise, more of a stylish platter aimed at grown-ups.

It’s the pastoral style of Pentangle overlaid with crazed early-70s wah-wah duelling--think a pistols-at-dawn affaire d’honneur between Larry Wallis and Mick Bolton--and it’s very good indeed.

[Producer Glyn Johns] has given this album a shape and purpose, bringing out the full range of Clapton’s guitar tones. Recording the album on analogue equipment probably helped too.

Dave Brock has long used his artistry with Hawkwind to entertain yet also to get us to think. This is among his most effective blows.

Close To The Noise Floor covers the full spectrum from sublime to ridiculous, but the sheer range of sonic innovation, warped beauty and dark humour here is hugely impressive.

Some of it’s inescapably retro, such as The Times’ I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape and Firmanent & The Elements’ The Festival Of Frothy Muggament. However, there are plenty of better-known names, sympaticos such as The Monochrome Set and TV Personalities, as well as an early demo from Doctor And The Medics, Barbara Can’t Dance, whose number one single Spirit In The Sky was the commercial highpoint of this movement.

This second album has the same sickening impact: 11 cold and merciless slashes of amorphous goth-pop that dish out sparse high-wire melodies, as on Harpstrings, Blume and the violent waltz of Velvet, like glimpses of sunlight to a basement gimp.

[Rise] sounds like it’s been designed solely with American radio very much in mind. Things pick up quickly from there though, You Have Come To The Right Place, puts things very much back on track, wilfully over-the-top, a grand façade covering the band’s broken veneer.

The songs are tight and feisty, with guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof and Rick Van Zandt trading off each other with flexibility and style, Howe giving full vent to his range and depth.

A whole album at 100 mph needs skill at the wheel not to start sounding slow, and for all the sensation of manic burn-out, every track has disciplined intricacy, using hairpin turns and jolting tape-slices to sculpt the gush of drums and feedback into prog-garage shape.

Songs such as the rolling The Devil Is In Her Eyes and the carefully layered Isabel’s Daughter are the work of a group who have absorbed much of what’s great about rock’n’roll and turned it loose in the present.

Aat its best this reassuringly svelte and only occasionally sparse eight-track EP is a thing of beauty.

Marlowe’s Revenge proves that his creative well is far from dry.

Civil Wars’ John Paul White and Alabama Shakes’ Ben Tanner leapt at the chance to produce his fourth album in 40 years and results are pleasing.

Envisioning sci-fi detective themes (Chasing The Tail Of A Dream), mariachi manhunts (It’s You) and Wall-E Of Arabia (Connector), it’s an imaginative if one-level album, animating only for the scuzzy motorik blues pop of Million Eyes, Fear Machine and Holy Revelation or the crisp, catchy psych-pop of Miss Fortune.

Cue nuggets of advice from someone who’s had his own share of knocks, self-inflicted and otherwise, as Simpson and the band tackle brassy R&B, Memphis soul and swampy country, augmented by semi-orchestral strings and bound together by his extraordinary baritone.

Though their trademark dynamics of rise and fall, and tension and release are firmly in evidence, there remains a mesmerising sheen throughout that’s utterly hypnotic.

Despite, or because of, its aptly era-appropriate brevity, English Heart is immaculate, and a lot better than it needs to be. Warm and beautiful.

Fans of Santana’s first trio of albums have wished for this project to happen for years. Now it’s here, most are likely to be very pleasantly surprised by how successfully it’s been done.

A lot of this record sounds like Psalm 69 if you turned the drum machine to the ‘Blur’ setting, a snarling hyperspeed punkdustrial vomitorium of choppy samples and churning metal riffs. It’s not all armed audio warfare, though.

d Three Men’s engaging mix of heaviness of duty and lightness of touch resonates timelessly.

Abstract and startling, listen to the hefty groove of Prayers/Triangles or the slow blooming Phantom Bride and feel the earth move beneath your feet.